Competing Visions of Integration as Moral Value: A Historical Perspective on New York City Public School Participants

• In Event: Why New York City School Desegregation Requires Systemic Thinking: A Transdisciplinary Conversation

Abstract

Objectives
This paper historically situates current de/segregation in New York City (NYC) public schools by focusing on Black and Latinx parents’ and the New York City Board of Education’s competing understandings of integration as a moral category during the Civil Rights Movement. Although NYC did not have legal school segregation as in the South, racist housing and employment policies and practices created a segregated school system (Biondi, 2003; Delmont, 2016; Purnell, 2013; Sugrue, 2008; Taylor, 1997). Parents and the Board each comprised individual actors within that system to advocate their views. While the Board was a centralized authority, parents organized to be heard. Dynamics of hierarchical school systems and collective organizing persist in NYC schools today (Cohen, 2021). I invite us to ask: how do NYC’s past integration struggles affect the present?

Sources
Drawing on years of research at over 11 archival repositories nationwide, I analyze reports, plans, and correspondence from the Board of Education’s 1957 Commission on Integration and the 1963 Freedom Schools that took place during the largest school boycott of the Civil Rights Movement, which was in NYC. These sources provide a window into grassroots claims about de/segregation.

Results
By analyzing the understandings of integration at play in the sources, I show that the Board framed integration as a moral value that already existed in the schools and did not require action, whereas Black and Latinx parents tied the value of integration to educational access and quality. In 1957, the Board claimed they were already doing integration because they promoted racial and religious pluralism; thus it is unsurprising that the Commission’s recommendations went unrealized.

Theoretical Framework
My research brings together three theoretical perspectives: religious studies, history of education, and critical studies on religion, race, and education as forms of colonial governance (Alexander, 2005; Freire, 1970; Johnson, 2015; Long, 1986; Smith, 1998). This interdisciplinary framework allows me to show that public school participants have historically connected race with inaccurate connotations about “good” or “bad” kids and schools.

Methods
When I approach historical documents, whether in a traditional religion, race, or education archive, I ask: how do the documents define religion, race, and education? I find that these three concepts appear near each other in the documents, and the definitions intersect. This finding shapes my perspective that religion, race, and education simultaneously and inseparably allow for domination, liberation, and community.

Scholarly Significance
Understanding that religion is inseparable from education, I bring together literature on school desegregation and religious pluralism for the first time to show how the Board’s pluralism was at odds with parents’ goals of desegregation because pluralism rhetoric prevented action (Bell, 2004; Bender and Klassen, 2010; Brown, 2006; Gaston, 2019). I build on research showing that informal, community organizing produced Black self-determination in NYC schools, not the Board. I do so by turning attention to the disconnect between goals and actions articulated by the board, and the religious and cultural traditions the parents drew on to make their claims (Lewis, 2013).

Author

• Leslie Ribovich, Transylvania University